Manhattan Skyscrapers [Hardcover]

Eric Nash (Author), Norman McGrath (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1999

The city of New York is the city of skyscrapers. Every first-time visitor to Manhattan experiences the awe of gazing up at the soaring stone, steel, and glass towers of Wall Street or Midtown, and wonders how those structures came to be built. Manhattan Skyscrapers answers the question by presenting the 75 most significant tall buildings that make up the city's famous skyline. From Louis Sullivan's Bayard-Condict Building of 1898 on Bleeker Street to the Conde Nast tower currently rising above Times Square, Manhattan Skyscrapers lavishly presents over a hundred years of New York's most interesting and important tall buildings. Author Eric P. Nash profiles familiar skyscrapers such as the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Towers, the AT&T (now Sony) Building, and the Seagram Building, while also championing several often-overlooked yet significant structures, such as the McGraw- Hill, the Metropolitan Life Insurance, and the Fred F. French Buildings. Nash's writing strikes an elegant balance between history, archi-tectural evaluation, and intelligent guidebook. For each building, Nash identifies the building style, gives the overall profile and image of the building, and discusses its construction; also included are quotes from the buildings' architects and the architectural critics of the time. Each skyscraper is illustrated with full-page color photo-graphs by noted photographer Norman McGrath as well as architectural drawings and plans, archival images of the original interiors, postcards, and other ephemera. Manhattan Skyscrapers is essential reading-or an ideal gift-for anyone interested in the buildings that make New York the ultimate skyscraper city.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Whether or not New York City, in all its teeming chaos, strikes readers as exciting or abominating, its superb urban architecture is undeniable. Life in the Big Apple is so fast-paced that most of the time the buildings that fill the island go unnoticed. Manhattan Skyscrapers offers the chance to leisurely peruse the stunning skyline, one building at a time, by compiling 75 of the most noteworthy towers in Manhattan (and one in Brooklyn). Spanning about a 100-year history and organized in chronological order, the book treats each skyscraper to its own section replete with photographs, commentary, and history. And the shifting architectural styles are fascinating to see in one volume. These tall buildings can appear intimidating, dwarfing the people who live in their midst, but this book offers readers an intimacy with these immense structures. There are details here that readers could easily miss in person; for instance, built into the lobby of the gothic-style Woolworth Building of 1913 are gargoyles depicting F.W. Woolworth counting his fortune and the builder in a monk's hood. The photographs are beautiful, with clear perspectives that seem almost impossible to get on the crowded streets of New York. --J.P. Cohen

From Publishers Weekly

Covering just over 100 years, Nash and McGrath offer New Yorkers a chance to take another look at buildings they may have stopped noticing. A chronological arrangement plucks buildings from their context and reveals a century's seismic shifts. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower (1909), essentially a double-sized reproduction of the Campanile of St. Mark's, gives way to the glass monoliths that today toggle between monumentality and disappearance, underscoring how these "Cathedrals of Commerce" (like the actual Cathedrals they replaced) tell stories about men whose ingenuity drove American capitalism and technology. Nash, who writes for The New York Times, is no wordsmith, but he has a knack for finding the perfect quote: the architect of the GE Building defends his Gothic radio-wave-topped design by saying its lines and curves are "intended to convey the directness and penetration of radio itself," while the head of the Real Estate Board states flatly that the buildings that went up at the end of World War II are modern, "Primarily because they are air-conditioned." Along with the excellent McGrath, Nash takes familiar icons of the New York skyline and makes them new again.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568981813
• ISBN-13: 978-1568981819
• Product Dimensions: 12.4 x 10 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,910,021 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent, but not definitive, November 23, 2001

By 

Matthew A. Brown "Matt" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhattan Skyscrapers (Hardcover)

I ordered this book after September 11th as a sort of timecapsule of the New York skyline and a historical record of the World Trade Center towers. The formatting of the book is nice, in chronological order by building, with equal background devoted to each building. There are wonderful pictures of every building, along with some building plans and surrounding area maps.

My biggest complaint is that this book devotes equal time to a lot of non-descript skyscrapers from the 1960's and 1970's that don't really add to the uniqueness of the NY skyline. Some of the architecture of that period is just drab and uninteresting. I would've liked to have seen more concentration on the earlier period of New York's building boom. I think more interior shots would round out this book. The book could also include at least another 50-75 buildings, which is why I don't feel that it's definitive.

That said, this is a nice book, well-formatted, which covers most of the landmark buildings in Manhattan, including the former World Trade Center towers and surrounding buildings.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is a MUST HAVE !, April 10, 2000

By 

Fernando Avila Ortiz (Mexico City, MEXICO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manhattan Skyscrapers (Hardcover)

I have read a lot of books about Manhattan Skyscrapers, but this is by far the BEST of all of them. The author makes a review of 75 of the most famous Manhattan's skyscrapers, with amazing pictures you've never seen before. Going in chronological order, it goes from the first skyscrapers, like the Flatiron Building, pasing through Empire State Building, Chrysler and Woolworth, and ending with the new Conde Naste Building at Broadway. If you love skyscraper architecture, this is THE Book ! .

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only the Best, October 8, 2000

By 

Andrew Stern (NewYorkCity) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhattan Skyscrapers (Hardcover)

This book pin pointed some of Manhattan's most noticable and famous skyscrapers. From early century to 2000 this book covers it all. It starts of with the best early buildings mainly near cityhall. Then continues to the towers of wall street, these are the big bold towers weve come to know in the financial district, from the equitable building that is the reason for new york zoning to 1 bankers trust and it's magnificant zuggarat roof. It's full of pictures and info you can't find anywhere else. The book gets more exciting as time progresses, mentioning towers from the Empire State building to the short beakman plaza it's all there. Modern towers are characterized magnificently, at first describing the landmarks such as the lever, seagram, and the U.N. to latter discussing Manhattan's Mega Skyscrapers such as U.S. Steel, G.M., Chase, and Metlife mentioning the sucesses and failures of each tower. At the end it describes the boom in timesquare and other new skyscrapers which escape the box. I read every page with great excitement and recommend it to everyone, it's full of info from an architect's and historians point of view